Spender - House in st johns wood - in search of my parents

Contents

Matthew Spender is a sculptor and the author of Within Tuscany and From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky. He lives with his wife, artist Maro Gorky, on a farm near Siena.

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I WOULD LIKE TO thank the following archivists and archives:

The Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations of the New York Public Library; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, CA; Isaac Gewirz at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library; Chris Fletcher, Colin Harris, Charlotte McKillop-Mash and Judith Priestman at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; The British Library, London; William Hansen at Duke University Special Collections, Durham, NC; Callista Lucy at the Library of Dulwich College, London; Andrew Gray at Durham University Library (UK); the T. S. Eliot Archive, London, and Debbie Whitfield, secretary to the late Valerie Eliot; The Stefan Georg Archive; Kristina Rosenthal at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, OK; the Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, TX; Richard Ring at Trinity College, Hartford, CT; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX; the Karl Marx Library, London; the National Archives at Kew; the University of Warwick Library.

Among My Friends and colleagues: Nelson Aldrich, Anita Auden, Don Bachardy, Simon Baddeley, Andrea Barzini, Theresa Booth, Keith Botsford, Katherine Bucknell, John Byrne, Joanna Clarke, Harald Clemen, Michele Cone, David Elliot, Jason Epstein, Natasha Fairweather, Michael Fishwick, Graham C. Greene, Walter Gsottschneider, Stephen Guise, Henry Hardy, Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Selina Hastings, Oliver Herford, Immy Humes, Chantal and John Hunt, Alan Jenkins, Nicholas Jenkins, Michael Jordan, Paul Keegan, Annette Kern-Sthler, Stephen Lushington, Edward Mendelson, Caroline Moorehead, Dominique Nabokov, Ute Oelmann, Peter Parker, Antony Percy, Matthew Pintus, Tristan Platt, Sarah Plimpton, Bill Price, Robin Ramsay, Vicky Randall, Tom Rivers, Georgie Rowse, Giovanni Russo, Stephen Schlesinger, Giles Scott-Smith, Bob Silvers, James Smith, Jane Spender, Rachel Spender, Julian Stern, Frances Stonor Saunders, John Sutherland, Martino Tomei, Jason Toynbee, Polly Toynbee, Ed Victor, Roman Vlad, Jennifer Josselson Vorbach, Willi Vossenkuhl, Hugh Wilford and Zinovy Zinik.

With Special Thanks to the late Reynolds Price, with whom, after a gap of forty years, I took up the thread of a conversation as if it had never been interrupted. To my sister Lizzie, who waived her copyright to our parents writings. To my cousin Philip Spender, who gave me several details I would otherwise have missed. Finally to Lara Feigel, Nico Mann, David Plante and our daughter Saskia, who read drafts of this book and gave excellent advice. And to Jonathan Galassi and Christopher Richards, my editors in New York; and Martin Redfern and Peter James, my editors in London.

When quoting from letters or diary entries, I have retained the errors of spelling and punctuation. Some errors are mere laziness, such as wont for wont, but others are indicative of the writers state of mind.

Within Tuscany

From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky

Edited and introduced by Matthew Spender:

Goats on the Roof

Il Diario di Sintra (in Italian)

Francis Bacon: Inseguire i Sensi (in Italian)

The photographs reproduced in this book are from the Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection, with the following exceptions:

: by Ida Kar, 1957 National Portrait Gallery, London

: courtesy of the Humphrey Spender Archive

: courtesy of Vicky Randall

: courtesy of Natasha Gorky

The author and publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the author and publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.

I T WAS W. H. Auden who taught me about adjectives. He stayed with us whenever he came to England. I was nine years old. Scene: 15 Loudoun Road, my parents house in St Johns Wood, eight-thirty in the morning. I was late for school. Wystan, with an air of having already been up for hours, was smoking at the breakfast table, bored or thoughtful, looking out of the window at the tangled ferns of the basement area. Mum and Dad were still in bed, in their bedroom with a large dressing-table on which lurked strange hairbrushes sold recently to Dad by a sadistic hairdresser who had persuaded him he was losing his hair.

I was in a panic over a test due that morning on what an adjective was.

Wystan looked surprised.

An adjective is any word that qualifies a noun, he said.

I know how to say that, I said. But I dont understand what it means.

He looked around the table, discarded the cereals and found among the debris of the night before a bottle of wine. One object more memorable than the others.

Ah you could say, the good wine, he said firmly. Its goodness qualifies the wine. Then he thought for a moment, peering at the bottle. The wine was good, he said, correcting himself; and added in a tragic voice, now all we have left is an empty bottle.

That summer, my sister and I had been abandoned on an island off the coast of Wales. Id liked it. Lots of puffins, a few cormorants and numerous placid sheep. On top of the hill in the middle of this island were three grass tombs of long-dead Vikings, and Bardsey Island had left me with an obsession with barrow-wights and the sinister mystery of Norse ghost stories. Hearing about this later that year, Wystan sent me from New York the Tolkien trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. I read it straight through.

Auden used to say that he knew where every detail of this trilogy came from and one day hed write about it. Dad tried it once but he found Tolkien tremendously boring.

Once, Wystan and I wrote Tolkienish poems together, still over breakfast but a few years after the adjectives. I collected them and copied them into a notebook that I decorated with a heraldic crest with whiskers, as that kind of shading was called at school. Here are a couple of verses:

and lords,

Had their realms on these downs of chalk,

And now guard their bountiful hoards,

One night you may see them walk.

They walk with creaks and groans

Cloaks fluttering as they go by,

They ride on enormous roans

Which block out the stars and the sky.

Lines two and four of each verse are Audens. Can I use them? Of course. I got the impression that words could be seized out of the air and given generously from one person to another.